CHAPTER XL

THE ROAD TO ARCADY

Before we saw the train which was to take us from Birmingham to Columbus, Mississippi, we began to sense its quality. When we attempted to purchase parlor car seats of the ticket agent at the Union Station and were informed by him that our train carried no parlor car, it seemed to us that his manner was touched with cynicism, and this impression was confirmed by his reply to our further timid inquiry as to a dining car:

"Where do you gentlemen reckon you're a-goin' to, anyhow?"

Presently we passed through the gate and better understood the nature of the ticket agent's thoughts. The train consisted of several untidy day coaches, the first a Jim Crow car, the others for white people. The negro car was already so full that many of its occupants had to stand in the aisle, but this did not seem to trouble them, for all were gabbling happily, and the impression one got, in glancing through the door, was of many sets of handsome white teeth displayed in as many dark grinning faces. There are innumerable things for which we cannot envy the negro, but neither his teeth nor his good nature are among them.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the two or three other cars, though not overcrowded, were well filled with people from the neighboring mining towns who were going home after having spent the morning shopping in the city. Almost all our fellow passengers carried packages, many had infants with them, and we were struck with the fact that the complexions of these people suggested a diet of pie--fried pie, if there be such a thing--that a peculiarly high percentage of them suffered from diseases of the eye, and that the pervading smell of the car in which we sat was of oranges, bananas, babies, and overheated adults.

A young mother in the seat in front of us had with her three small children, the youngest an infant in arms. She was feeding a banana to the second child, who looked about two years old. Behind us a clean, capable-looking woman talked in a broad Scottish dialect with another housewife whose jargon was that of the mountaineers.

The region through which the train presently began to wind its way was green and hilly, and there were many stops at villages, all of them mining camps apparently, made up of shabby little cabins scattered helter-skelter upon the hillsides. In many of the cabin doorways mothers lingered with their broods watching the train, and on all the station platforms stood crowds of idlers--men, women, and children, negro and white--many of the men stamped, by their coal-begrimed faces, their stained overalls, and the lamps above the visors of their caps, as mine workers.

After a time my companion and I moved to the exceedingly dirty smoking room at the end of the car, where we sat and listened to the homely conversation of a group of men who seemed not only to know one another, but to know the same people in towns along the line. Between stations they gossiped, smoked, chewed, spat, and swore together like so many New England crossroad sages, but when the train stopped they gave encouraging attention to the droll performances of one of their number, a shaggy, unshaven, rawboned man, of middle age, gray-haired and collarless, who sat near the window and uttered convincing imitations of the sounds made by chickens, roosters, pigs, goats, and crows.

The platform crowds, the negroes in particular, were mystified and lured by this animal chorus coming from a passenger coach. On hearing it they would first gaze in astonishment at the car, then edge up to the windows and doors, and peer in with eyes solemn, round, and wondering, only to be more amazed than ever by the discovery that the car housed neither bird nor beast. This bucolic comedy was repeated at every station until we reached Wyatt, Alabama, where our gifted fellow traveler arose, pointed his collar button toward the door, bade us farewell, and departed, saying that he was going to "walk over to Democrat."

Presently the conductor dropped in for a chat, in the course of which he informed the assembly that a certain old lady in one of the towns along the way had died the night before, whereupon our companions of the smoking room, all of whom seemed to have known the old lady well, held a protracted discussion of her history and traits.

After a time my companion and I put in a few questions about the State of Mississippi. Boiled down, the principal information we gathered was as follows:

By the 1910 census Mississippi had not one city of 25,000 inhabitants. Meridian, with 23,000, was (and probably still is) her metropolis, with Jackson and Vicksburg, cities of about 20,000 each, following. The entire State has but fifteen cities having a population of 5000 or more, so that, of a total of about a million and three-quarters of people in the State (more than half of them colored), only about one-tenth live in towns with a population of 5000 or over.

After a little visit the conductor went away. Now and then a man would leave us and get off at a station, or some new passenger would join our group. Presently I found myself thinking about dinner, and asked a man wearing an electric-blue cap if he knew what provision was made for the evening meal.

Before he could reply the train boy, who had come into the smoking room a few minutes before, piped up. He was a train boy of a type I had supposed extinct: the kind of train boy one might have encountered on almost any second-rate train twenty years ago,--a bold, impudent young smartaleck, full of insistent salesmanship and obnoxious conversation. He declared that dinner was not to be had, and that the only sustenance available en route consisted in the uninviting assortment of fruit, nuts, candy, and sweet tepid beverages contained in his basket.

Fortunately for us, the man we had addressed knew better.

"What do you want to lie like that for, boy?" he demanded. "You know as well as I do that the brakeman takes on five boxes of lunch at Covin."

"Well," said the boy, with a grin, "I gotta sell things, ain't I? The brakeman hadn't oughta have that graft anyhow. _I'd_ oughta have it. He gets them lunches fer two bits and sells 'em for thirty-five cents." Far from feeling abashed, he was pleased with himself.

"Folks is funny people," remarked a man with a weather-beaten face who sat in the corner seat, and seemed to be addressing no one in

## particular. "I know a boy that's going to git hung some day. And when

they've got the noose rigged nice around his neck, and everything ready, and the trap a-waitin' to be sprung, why, then that boy is goin' to be so sorry for hisself that he won't hardly know what to do. He'll say: 'I ain't never had no chance in life, I ain't. The world ain't never used me right.' ... Yes, folks is funny people."

After this soliloquy there occurred a brief silence in the smoking room, and presently the train boy took up his basket and went upon his way.

"You say they take on the lunches at Covin now?" one of the passengers asked of the man in the electric-blue cap.

"Yes."

"What's become of old man Whitney, over to Fayetteville?"

"They used to git lunches off of him," replied the other, "but the old man wasn't none too dependable. Now and then he'd oversleep, and folks on the 5 A.M. out of Columbus was like to starve for breakfast."

"Right smart shock-headed boy the old man's got," put in another. "The old man gives 'im anything he wants. He wanted a motorcycle, and the old man give 'im one. Then he wanted one of them hot-candy machines; they cost about two hundred and fifty dollars, but the old man give it to 'im just the same."

"The kid went to San Francisco with it, didn't he?" asked the man with the electric-blue cap.

"He started to go there," replied the former speaker, "but he only got as fur as Little Rock; then he come on back home, and the old man bought 'im a wireless-telegraph plant. Yeaup! That boy gets messages right outa the air--from Washington, D.C., and Berlin, and every place. The Govamunt don't allow 'im to tell you much of it. He tells a little, though--just to give you a notion."

So, through the five-hour ride the conversation ran. Several times the talk drifted to politics and to the European War, but the politics discussed were local and lopsided, and the war was all too clearly regarded as something interesting but vague and remote. On the entire journey not one word was spoken indicating that the people of this section had the least grasp on any national question, or that they were considering national questions, or that they realized what the war in Europe is about--that it is a war for freedom and democracy, a war against war, a war to prevent a few individuals from ever again plunging the world into war. Nor, though the day of our entry into the war was close at hand, had the idea that we might be forced to take part in the conflict so much as occurred to any of them.

They were not stupid people; on the contrary, some of them possessed a homely and picturesque philosophy; but they were not informed, and the reason they were not informed has to do with one of the chief needs of our rural population--especially the rural population of the South.

What they need is good newspapers. They need more world news and national news in place of county news and local briefs. In the whole South, moreover, there is need for general political news instead of biased news written always from inside the Democratic party, and sandwiched in between patent medicine advertisements.

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